Legendre Polynomial.pdf

1 Legendre Polynomial The Legendre polynomials, sometimes called Legendre functions of the first kind, Legendre coefficients, or zonal harmonics (Whittaker and Watson 1990, p. 302), are solutions to the Legendre differential equation. If is an integer, they are polynomials. The Legendre polynomials are illustrated above for and , 2, ..., 5. They are implemented in Mathematica as LegendreP[n, x]. The Legendre polynomial can be defined by the contour integral (1) where the contour encloses the origin and is traversed in a counterclockwise direction (Arfken 1985, p. 416). The first few Legendre polynomials are (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) When ordered from smallest to largest powers and with the denominators factored out, the triangle of nonzero coefficients is 1, 1, , 3, , 5, 3, , ... (Sloanes A008316). The leading denominators are 1, 1, 2, 2, 8, 8, 16, 16, 128, 128, 256, 256, ... (Sloanes A060818). The first few powers in terms of Legendre polynomials are (9) (10) (11) 2 (12) (13) (14) (Sloanes A008317 and A001790). A closed form for these is given by (15) (R. Schmied, pers. comm., Feb. 27, 2005). For Legendre polynomials and powers up to exponent 12, see Abramowitz and Stegun (1972, p. 798). The Legendre polynomials can also be generated using Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization in the open interval with the weighting function 1. (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) Normalizing so that gives the expected Legendre polynomials. The shifted Legendre polynomials are a set of functions analogous to the Legendre polynomials, but defined on the interval (0, 1). They obey the orthogonality relationship (23) The first few are (24) (25) (26) (27) The Legendre polynomials are orthogonal over with weighting function 1 and satisfy (28) w